23 Quotes by Joel Greenblatt

If I plug my estimates into the Magic Formula, and it comes out cheap, that’s good.

Choosing individual stocks without any idea of what you’re looking for is like running through a dynamite factory with a burning match. You may live, but you’re still an idiot.

The more confidence I have in each one of my stock picks, the fewer companies I need to own in my portfolio to feel comfortable.

It just seems logical that sticking to investing in only a small number of companies that you understand well, rather than moving down the list to your thirtieth or fiftieth favorite pick, would create a much greater potential to earn above-average investment returns.

Figure out what something is worth and pay a lot less.

I wait until an investment idea is so good, it hits me over the head like an anvil.

My goal is to buy a company at a low multiple to normal earnings power several years out and that the company earns good returns on capital at that level of normal earnings. A holding period of more than one year also works quite well as the factors are persistent in years 2 and 3.

I don’t know too many people that are good at timing the market relative to macro-economic events.

I think the exercise of trying to figure out how to simplify concepts has been incredibly helpful to me over the last 13 years of teaching and I hope my students have benefited from it.